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Yearbook Seizure Violated First Amendment
Kentucky State University violated the First Amendment when it seized copies of a university-funded student yearbook, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled in January.
The case at issue, Kincaid v. Gibson, stemmed from a 1994 incident in which officials at KSU confiscated the yearbooks and prevented their distribution. They did so because they objected to aspects of the publication’s design, including the use of photographs unrelated to the institution, a lack of captions accompanying many photographs, and a failure to incorporate school colors into the cover. Two students brought suit against the university in 1995.
In 1997 a district court ruled that the university had acted appropriately because the yearbook was a "nonpublic forum" and the university had a right to approve its content. A three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit court upheld that decision in 1999. But in January’s decision, the full appellate court disagreed, ruling that the yearbook was a "limited public forum" and that the university’s confiscation of the book was arbitrary and unreasonable. "We will not sanction a reading of the First Amendment that permits government officials to censor expression in a limited public forum in order to coerce speech that pleases the government," the judges wrote.
In 1998 the AAUP joined the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression in filing an amicus brief before the appellate court, arguing that the administration’s actions violated the students’ First Amendment right to publish the yearbook. The AAUP was particularly concerned that the district court had applied to the university setting the Supreme Court ruling in Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, which grants schools broad control over high school newspapers. The judges involved in the most recent ruling said that Hazelwood had "little application to this case." The ruling comes as a relief to student journalists, media advocates, and journalism professors, who had feared that another ruling in favor of KSU could have increased the power of administrators to censor student publications.
"Nearly thirteen years to the day after the Supreme Court allowed school officials greater censorship authority over the expression of many high school students, the court today has drawn a clear and strong line saying that such censorship must stop at the college gate," says Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center.
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